SEUL: [Fwd: Undeliverable MSMail Message]

[Stefan Rieken <StefanRieken@SoftHome.net>]

I had some kind of trouble posting this message due to French headers or
whatever... Really don't know. So I forward it now... Hope it's still
readable.
> 
> Roger R Dingledine wrote:
> >
> > First of all, Stefan: are you actually on this list?
> > If not, you should subscribe. :) You can read the back-articles
> > (including this thread so far) at
> > http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/pub/
> >
> 
> I made a mistake; I didn't confirm the confirmation message. I did now,
> and browsing through the archives I saw that my message had arrived and
> I read the follow-ups. I must thank you for forwarding it to the list.
> 
> To answer some of the questions forthcoming from it:
> 
> Why I wrote this: I was kind of disappointed that the Linux community is
> not super-robust. I once followed a flame war of GNOME against KDE, for
> instance, and off course all the stuff against newbies. This makes the
> community a little unstable and that is exactly what we don't need (I
> see it as internal FUD). Free software will continue to exist with or
> without this little unstability, so you might wonder what I am
> complaining about.
> 
> Someone once said that you don't have to choose between software today
> for its quality, but only for the affection you have with it, it's
> "image". A whole lot of Linux users tend to like their product just
> because of its community image. As this image represents the product, a
> bad community image would result in bad feelings about the product. I
> want to keep the moral high (also my own), and so I tried to deal with
> the problem by mentioning it and showing a way out.
> 
> As for the big business part: I personally think that businesses will do
> some good work, because they are more motivated to make Linux an
> all-users product than the geek-in-the-street. So I set my hope on a
> happy end on them, and that is why they are mentioned in the end of my
> text (I don't write dramas :-). But actually they are of minor
> importance: they can write as good software as they want, as long as the
> "dummies" are still ignored by the community, I think we haven't come
> any further.
> 
> As for the typo's: after re-re-re-reading, I myself even noticed some
> typo's in this version :-|. As for the strange sentences: I have this
> tendency to translate Dutch sentences literally into English without
> thinking. My English teacher still hates me for that :-). I don't know
> if I'll ever have a good occasion for further publishing, but in that
> case I think I'll have to re-re-re-re-read it...
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Stefan